Nokia N8: Is it really accessible? Find yourself

This report might concern to some people same as it initially did to my dear friend and very good tester Santhosh Tuppad -Why am I testing and writing a report for a phone which is ousted from the market? The simple reason is that I currently own only this phone and I don’t have any other option until it stops working or I loose it somewhere or somebody gifts me a latest phone. 

I have Nokia N8 with me since last two years but it was first time when I tested it from accessibility point of view - The reason is my current interest in the area of accessibility testing.

(Image Credits: http://www.livechennai.com)

Before moving to my report, I would like to share brief history of Nokia N8: (Credits: Wikipedia)

The Nokia N8 is a touchscreen-based smartphone developed by Nokia. The Nokia N8 is the first device to run on the Symbian^3 mobile operating system and Nokia's flagship device of 2010. The N8 became the product with the most customer pre-orders in Nokia's history up to the point of its release and sales in Q4 2010 have been estimated to be almost 4 million. The N8 has a capacitive touchscreen and the first Nokia phone with multi-touch.

Believing the numbers it can be interpreted that it was one of popular phones from Nokia so this report might interest to many mobile testers and phone users.

For ease of understanding, I have divided my reports into three zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Red zone is danger zone which lists the accessibility issues of the phone. Contrary to Red zone, Green zone is the safest zone which lists the accessibility features. Yellow zone is placed somewhere mid of these two.

Red Zone

No Compatibility for Hearing Aid: One of the biggest drawbacks of Nokia N8 from accessibility  perspective that it doesn’t not provide compatibility with Hearing aids which could have helped user with Hear loss.

Voice Command: Nokia N8’s Voice Command feature seems most problematic area to me. There is no hard button for Voice Command which makes it difficult to use for visually challenged user. Placing a shortcut can’t be helpful as user can not open Voice Command by giving a voice command. Other drawbacks which I noticed are:

• The shortcut buttons are small in size which can make it difficult to use for user with partially eye sight / motor disabilities.
• It has limited functionality. You can use it for single word basic commands, don’t expect much from this.
• The other most irritating feature is that it auto closes after 5 seconds. User needs to enter commands within 5 seconds otherwise ‘Poof’. For a user who stutters (for example, stuttering which causes involuntary silent pauses or blocks) can be quite difficult to use it.

No Stylus: Nokia N8 is delivered without any stylus. A stylus can be useful for the user’s with motor disabilities and not every stylus can be used with Nokia N8 because of Capacitive Touchscreen which requires an electrical conductor such as Human body to send the signal. Such devices need special capacitive stylus to work upon.

No Screen Magnifier: A screen magnifier is a very good and one of essential tools for users with low vision but Nokia N8 is missing it. Although they  have provide Zoomer which have limited functionality  and placed in Yellow Zone.

Yellow Zone

Font Formatting: This is an area which could have been made most useful for users with low eyesight but N8 miserably fails here. N8 has feature to change the font size, which ironically, applicable on text messages only. The other text such as application labels remain same.

Also, user can use only one default font style provided in the phone. I couldn’t find any feature which changes the font style used in the phone.

Zoomer: Nokia provides Zoomer to zoom in the pictures and the text content. That’s all. You are unable to see any icon, it’s not their problem. Their is no feature of screen magnification or resizing the icons.

Screen Reader: There is no default screen reader provided in Nokia N8. Users need to install a 3^rd Party tool if they need one. Thankfully, Nokia N8 has a Message Reader which can read inbox messages for user.

Green Zone

The features listed in green zone might be common to any other smart phone but they definitely need a mention here.

Alert: N8 can alert user in many ways according to user’s preference. It has different alert options like Ringing, Vibrating, Flashing which finally adds some plus points to its credits.

Conversation: Messages are displayed in conversation form. It means a user can view complete conversion made with another user quickly without any hassle. This feature can be useful for users with bad or short term memory.

Help: This is the feature which I liked most about N8. It provides relevant help on every single screen. Help is just one tap away from the user.

Shortcut: Although, this feature doesn’t seem anything special for a smart phone but I believe it as one of the important accessible feature. It helps user to open an application quickly and avoids the longer path. Important feature for users with motor disabilities.

Consistency: The phone has consistent functionality on each screen.

Associating Caller’s Image and Tone: User can associate caller’s image and separate tone with the number which could help user to identify caller easily. The feature can be useful for short term memory and visually challenged users.

Compatible with Text Phones: N8 is compatible with the Text Phones. A text phone can help user to type and read conversation during a call, rather than using speech and hearing communication.

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Conclusion: Nokia has provided some basic accessible features in N8 which every other phone in market have. They should give more importance to accessibility and usability in their new upcoming phones if they really want to have an edge over other mobile giants such as Apple or Samsung.

Hope you find this post useful and informative. Please share your feedback in comment section.

ALT Text - Alternative, Not Optional

When, as testers, we talk about testing a web application for accessibility, first test which comes in mind to verify the alternative text for the images available on the webpage and why not? - After all, it is one of the simplest and most important tests to perform.


The alternative text is meant to provide the information about the image to the users who are visually disabled and using the screen readers or text browsers or who have disabled the images in their browsers. An alternative text should only provide the information what the image is all about and unnecessary information should be avoided.

An alternative text

• should be written based on context of the image and content. Providing a description is not necessarily useful every time. For example, following alternative text is detailed enough - “A horizontal rectangular flag with three colours in order of Saffron, White and Green with a 24 spoke wheel in Navy Blue at centre” but it will take time for user to process all provided information. Instead, “Indian Flag” or “Tricolour” or “Flag of India” could make more sense to user.

•  should be set as Null for decorative images and images which do not convey any information. Providing unnecessary information slows down the browsers which render the images into speech or Braille output. Moreover, it will frustrate the user.
  The decorative images should be used in CSS instead of HTML. For some reason if decorative image is being used in HTML, don’t forget to set ALT attribute as NULL.

Now, we will see how alternative text renders in different browsers: For example purpose, we have stripped of a section of the Infibeam home page. Here, our point of concentration is “Magic Box” image as highlighted in the below picture:

Original Image:

In below section of this blogpost, we will see how the images are displayed in different browsers:

IE9

Scenario 1: Disabled Images with alternative text

Scenario 2: Disabled Images without alternative text

Mozilla Firefox

Scenario 1: Disabled Images with alternative text

Scenario 2: Disabled Images without alternative text

Google Chrome

Scenario 1: Disabled Images with alternative text

As depicted above, Google Chrome is unable to render the alternative text if image is disabled which makes users unable to read the content who have disabled the images for any reason. Here, web content is made accessible but user agent is not accessible. Hence, Accessible User Agents is also an important factor for making web accessible.

Personally, I liked the way how IE9 depicted the information to its user compared to other user agents.

There are few misconceptions about ALT attribute which I would like to mention here:

• ALT is not an HTML tag, it is an attribute of IMG tag. The term tag is commonly misused with ALT and should be avoided.
• Alternative text is not optional for Images available on a webpage. According to HTML 4.01 specification, the ALT attribute must be specified for the IMG and AREA elements. It is optional for the INPUT and APPLET elements.
• ALT and TITLE attributes are not interchangeable. In days gone by, browsers used to render the text in ALT attribute as Tool Tip Text instead of TITLE attribute which is intended for that purpose. The issue is fixed in new versions of the browser.

Complex images:

Sometimes, an image might be too complex for user and may require descriptive information for example a complex chemical structure of an element or a map or a char. We can provide the information by the mean of ALT text but a long description by screen reader doesn’t sound well in between of main topic. User might also lose track from original document. In such scenario, user must facilitate with different attribute.

One such attribute is LONGDESC which is purposely used when a long description is needed to explain the image. LONGDESC attribute of image tag must contain the URL of the page where description of image is available and should not have description text itself. Although, LONGDESC is useful but it is not supported anymore by major browsers and subsequently, has been dropped from HTML5 specification.

The other way around is to use the D-Link which is also out of fashion. The D-Link is a normal text link hyperlinked with long description page. The D stands for Description. See below how it can be used.

When user clicks on link [D] in the below screenshot, it will be redirected to “LONGDESC.html” page.

As both methods mentioned above are not in use anymore, the best and effective way is to provide the description along with the image itself and it will benefit everybody.